Texas Born

by Gould, Judith

  Slowly everyone stopped talking and turned to face him. He smiled, adjusted his tie importantly, and twisted his neck as if his shirt collar were too tight. 'Ladies and gentlemen. Senoras and senores . . .' His voice was loud and uneven. 'I am proud to be here today, as I am sure all of you are too.' He consulted the prepared speech he was holding. 'Nothing is as vital to a town as commerce, and with this new highway, this artery, if you will . . .'He rambled on awhile, and people soon began to get restless. Finally he looked up from the paper. 'We have one person to thank for this, and I wish you would all join me in giving her a long, loud ovation. Ladies and gentlemen, senoras and senores. I give you . . . Mrs. Elizabeth-Anne Hale!'

  There was a thunderous roar of applause as Elizabeth-Anne strode as quickly through the crowd as her pregnancy would allow. She stepped up on the podium, tears sparkling in her eyes, and nodded several times. Finally she held up her hands. 'Senoras and senores,' she began in a clear, distinct voice, pointedly addressing the Spanish-speaking population first. She smiled and sought out the eyes of her workmen. 'Fellow amigos. Ladies and gentlemen. I feel at a loss for words to describe the way I feel today— the gratitude that I owe your overwhelming work and devotion on this project, and the belief you had in it to sustain it. It would never have been possible without the many, many long and arduous hours you have given—along with your blood, sweat, and tears—to see it through to completion. There were many times when we all thought that it would never happen, that the odds were too overwhelming. But because we all believed, because we all gave it our very best, a dream has become a reality. And I think we've proved something else too. That we can work together, all of us, regardless of which side of town we come from. I think it's time, since I've come to know so many of you, to stop having a Mexican Town and a Quebeck. It's my town. Your town. It's our town.'

  Elizabeth-Anne's voice broke, and tears began to slide down her cheeks. 'I don't know what else to say except . . . I'll never forget what we've accomplished here. Never. Gracias,' she whispered. 'Thank you.'

  She stepped heavily down off the podium to thunderous applause.

  'Goddammit, Harvey!' the mayor hissed to someone. 'If that wasn't a campaign speech, I don't know what it was. Next thing we know, she's going to be running for mayor—'

  Suddenly Carlos Cortez was at Elizabeth-Anne's side. 'Senora, we have two little problems.'

  She turned to him and wiped her eyes. 'What's wrong?'

  'First of all, you forgot to cut the ribbon.' He held out the scissors.

  She laughed. 'So I'll cut it. And the second problem?'

  'Two carloads of travelers . . . well, they just pulled in looking for a room. And we're not even set up yet!'

  Her eyes flashed. 'Like hell we aren't! Get them into units three and four right this minute!' she said crisply. Then they both threw back their heads and laughed uproariously. Finally she looked down at the scissors she was holding and thrust them back at him. 'Run and cut the ribbon so that they can check in. I've got to go find Rosa and see where she had them put all the sheets and blankets!'

  It was evening. Carlos Cortez drove them back into town in a borrowed Ford and dropped them off in front of the café. Elizabeth-Anne smiled across the seat at him. 'Thank you for the ride, Senor Cortez,' she said. 'It was very kind of you to bring us back.'

  He shrugged. 'De nada. It is nothing. I'm glad, Mrs. Hale . . .' He stopped suddenly, then smiled. 'This is the first time in years that anyone has taken on the Sextons and beat them in building any kind of business around here. And it is the first time I have ever had the opportunity to prove what I can do—besides yard work. I'm glad.'

  'And so am I.' Elizabeth-Anne twisted around in her seat. 'Come on, girls.' She watched as Regina, Charlotte-Anne, and Rebecca piled out of the back of the car.

  'Senora?' Carlos said softly.

  Her legs half out of the car, Elizabeth-Anne turned around to face him. 'Yes?'

  'There is one mystery I still have not solved. I know you ran out of money long ago. Where did you get the rest you needed in order to complete the tourist court?'

  'I seem to have a guardian angel,' she said softly.

  'It seems, senora, that you do indeed.'

  She smiled. 'Well, the girls are waiting.' On an impulse she leaned over and kissed his cheek. 'Buenos noches, Carlos,' she said, using his first name for the first time. 'And thank you.'

  'Buenas noches, senora,' he said politely.

  She shook her head. 'Elizabeth-Anne.'

  He grinned suddenly, showing strong white teeth. 'Good night, Elizabeth-Anne.'

  She stood outside on Main Street watching him drive off. She took a deep breath and smiled. She felt good for the first time since Zaccheus had left. She felt totally alive. And tired. Absolutely dead tired.

  'Off to bed,' she told the girls.

  They groaned, but they came up to her one by one and kissed her goodnight. Then they dragged themselves reluctantly upstairs.

  For a while Elizabeth-Anne stood outside on the porch. She tilted her head back. The night was cool and clear, exactly the same kind of night as that last one she had spent with him. Even the moon was the same.

  'I did all right, Zaccheus, wouldn't you say?' she whispered into the night. 'Wherever you are, I think you'd be proud of me today.'

  Then slowly, wearily, she trudged upstairs. She was tired. She didn't remember ever having been this tired in all her life. It was as if all the sleep she had missed during the past several months was cumulatively catching up with her.

  She looked in on the girls. They must have been worn out too. They were already fast asleep.

  She went to her room and lowered herself down on the stool in front of her dressing table. She took the pins out of her hair, one by one. Then she moved over to the bed and sat down on the edge of it. For once, she didn't even bother to get undressed. She didn't even take off her sturdy boots. Her eyelids closed even as she was sitting down, and by the time her head touched the pillow, she was already sound asleep.

  9

  That night she dreamed the nightmare again. The same nightmare she had dreamed ever since she was six years old. It never varied. Always, it was the same.

  Once again she was leaping from trapeze to trapeze, leaping nimbly through the surprisingly smokeless air—but this time she was being chased through the burning circus tent—by Jenny. Jenny with skin hideously charred and blistered, like blackened, wrinkled paper partially smoothed back out. Where Jenny's skin had been burned through, she could see the baked, festering flesh beneath, rotting and crawling with maggots.

  Music seemed to come at her from all sides—the madly racing, insistent chimelike tune of a calliope, ever speeding up faster and faster until the tune was no longer recognizable.

  As Elizabeth-Anne dived from one trapeze to another, swinging out over the flames, she caught sight of what lay below her, and she sucked in her breath. A forest of charred tent poles plunged down, down, down—down to blazing infinity, to eternal roaring hell itself, and slowly swinging trapezes stretched for mile after endless mile. Sliding slowly and silently under some smooth, mysterious locomotion, one-dimensional cutouts of everyone she had ever known—Zaccheus, Szabo, Marikka, the Grubbs, and Auntie—glided untouched through the flames. Overhead, from horizon to horizon, the sky was an inverted bowl of fire, oppressively low and red and blazing. The calliope seemed to fuel the flames. As the music gained speed, so too the flames gained power, crackling ever higher and faster.

  She glanced behind her and opened her mouth to form a scream, but no sound was forthcoming. Jenny had been chasing her for an eternity, and was gaining on her.

  'You stole Zaccheus and Auntie from me, 'Lizbeth- Anne!' Jenny shrieked over and over, her hideous high-pitched voice echoing back and forth with resonant hollowness. 'You stole from me, and now I'll burn you, you freak!'

  Elizabeth-Anne glanced back over her shoulder again. Jenny was gaining even more quickly on her now. Her legs were spread ap
art, each bare charred foot balanced on a different trapeze, and the flaming torch she brandished in each hand sent chimeras of windblown orange flames across her shriveled skin. Her blackened, wrinkled face was contorted into an evil mask, and bits of her nose and cheeks crumbled away, showing the decomposing skull underneath. ' 'Lizbeth-Anneeee . . .' Jenny's lips were curved in a wide satanic grin, but it was her eyes which were the most terrible thing of all to behold. They bulged and leered and burned deeply with a thousand ferocious fires and seemed to pierce right through Elizabeth-Anne's own.

  Jenny arched her body and swung faster, leaping effortlessly ever closer. The crackling torches flared, sending showers of red sparks into the gusting wind. The stench of the ferocious fire was overbearing, and Elizabeth-Anne's throat felt raw and scratchy.

  Suddenly she could no longer breathe. Her lungs felt as though they were going to burst, and she fought for air, but there was none to be had. The fire was sucking up all the available oxygen, fueling itself into an even greater fury, and she knew that if she did not fall from the trapeze down, down, down into burning, everlasting death, then she would surely suffocate at any moment.

  She tried to breathe more deeply. More quickly. More desperately.

  Air! Air! AIR!

  Her body was screaming for air . . .

  The nightmare seemed so real that she writhed and coughed in her sleep. Her head was throbbing violently, and she was racked with convulsions, her arms flailing, her head whipping from side to side on the pillow. She screamed and gasped in agony, her mouth moving furiously but emitting no more sound than pitiful little sobs.

  Then suddenly she sat bolt upright, at once wide-awake.

  It was like awakening in a blast furnace. Her bedroom seemed brighter than a thousand blinding suns, and was filled with a crackling roar. The walls pulsated and flickered with blue, orange, white, and yellow, and the floor was a lively sea of flames. Greedy tongues of fire were lapping the walls, tasting the pink- cabbage-rose wallpaper, and devouring it hungrily.

  I'm still dreaming! she thought as she looked around in puzzled confusion. Why am I not waking up?

  And then she smelled the faint, unmistakable odor of kerosene on top of the stench of burning, and suddenly the terrible realization hit her.

  'Oh, my God!' she mouthed in panic. 'I'm no longer dreaming! My bedroom really is on fire!'

  She sat huddled there on the bed in bewildered fear. She knew she had to try to jump out of bed and make a run for the door, but she couldn't move. She couldn't move! She let out a high-pitched keening sound. What was it? Why couldn't she make a run for it through the flames? Why was she frozen?

  The waves of intense heat were unbearable; everything shimmered as though seen through rippled glass. She heard a sudden Whoosh! and spun her head to her right. She let out a drawn-out whimper. Dancing dervishes of flame were flicking at one of the curtains; then it caught fire, a pillar of flame shooting ferociously up the fabric, all the way to the ceiling.

  'Oh, God!' She shielded her face with her arms against the heat. 'I'm going to die,' she whispered to herself, her teeth chattering noisily. 'My baby and I both are going to die!' As if to emphasize this fact, she felt a sharp, violent kick within her belly.

  She buried her face in her hands, the tears streaming down her cheeks. 'Oh, my God, my God, we're both going to die the horrible death of my nightmares!'

  And then, above the hideous roaring and furious crackling, she heard another sound. A high-pitched staccato series of laughs.

  'Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!'

  It was a musical laugh, a well-modulated scale rippling up and down the register.

  Slowly she let her hands drop. Now even more terror seized her in its grip.

  Jenny! That was her voice. She was somewhere close by.

  Elizabeth-Anne turned her face toward the door, forcing herself to look across the floor of fire. Behind the flames, out in the relative safety of the hallway, stood Jennifer Sue Sexton. Her face and body shimmered in the radiant waves of heat like some terrible yellow-and-red mirage.

  Elizabeth-Anne looked desperately around for an avenue of escape. Somehow she had to get out of this inferno . . . had to escape this terrible madness while there was still time.

  ' 'Lizbeth-Anne . . .' Jenny singsonged in a clear, mellifluous voice. 'You're going to die!'

  'Nooooo!' The scream burst forth from Elizabeth-Anne, the very cry of fear and terror which had been welling up inside her even while she had been asleep. Now it burst powerfully from within her, and with it she somehow gained the power of movement. Gone now was the paralysis of terror. She scrambled about the bed on her hands and knees like a caged animal seeking escape.

  The window! I have to get to the window! The porch roof slopes down outside it, and I can slide off it, jumping down to the safety of Main Street! Yes, the window . . .

  . . . No, not the window! Not with the baby I'm carrying. The impact of the jump would surely kill or damage the unborn child as surely as if I remained trapped in this room and we both burned to death.

  'Oh, sweet baby Jesus,' she prayed, 'I can't even jump out the window! I don't even know if . . . if I have the courage to cross that burning floor!'

  Jenny smiled crookedly across the room at her.

  'I've been waiting for this!' she sang. 'Oh, but how badly I've been waiting for this!'

  'You're mad!' Elizabeth-Anne sobbed in a choked voice. 'You're a lunatic! Why didn't we all see it before? You're stark, raving mad!'

  'So I'm mad, am I?' Jenny chortled gleefully, her eyes flashing. 'Well, I know what you're going to be shortly! A pile of ashes! You and that precious baby of yours!' Her hysterical peals of laughter reverberated above the roar of the flames . . . seemed to fan them . . . seemed to intensify the hideous devilishness of the nightmare Elizabeth-Anne was living.

  'I've got to get out!' Elizabeth-Anne repeated over and over to herself in a desperate murmur. 'Somehow I've got to get out of here!'

  'You were always afraid of fire, weren't you,' 'Lizbeth-Anne?' Jenny taunted. 'Oh, it's a fitting end for you, isn't it? Poetic, I'd say.'

  'Oh, God!' Elizabeth-Anne whimpered, thrusting one hand in her mouth. 'Oh, God!' Her eyes darted about wildly. Only the bed was not yet a sea of fire, but she knew it was only a matter of seconds before it, too, would erupt into flames. And then what? She scrabbled around the mattress, her hair falling down over her face, her eyes wild with fear. She couldn't jump out the window to safety; she couldn't even gather up the courage to jump off the bed, race to the door, and go rushing out. She couldn't! Not through fire. Anything but fire.

  This can't be happening, she screamed silently to herself. No! It can't be! I'm dreaming. It's an extension of my nightmares. That's all it is!

  At that very moment the first tongues of flame shot up around the bed, gorging themselves on the sheets.

  She squeezed her eyes shut and pounded her forehead with her fists. 'I've got to wake up! I've got to wake up!''

  ' 'Lizbeth-Anne,' Jenny sang liltingly, 'it's not going to help you to shut your eyes. 'Lizbeth-Anne, you're going to burn!'

  Elizabeth-Anne clapped her hands over her ears. 'Stop it!' she screamed, shaking her head furiously. 'Stop it, stop it, stop it!'

  'How does it feel, 'Lizbeth-Anne? Is it hot? Is it smoky? Do you smell your burning flesh yet? Is it like it was with the circus?'

  'Stop it!'

  'Oh, no, 'Lizbeth-Anne. This is far, far too precious. And look, you're not the only one who's going to burn. You're not going to be alone. Look here, 'Lizbeth-Anne! Look at what Jenny's got!'

  Elizabeth-Anne slowly opened her eyes. They were stinging and gritty from all the smoke. She gazed at Jenny through the haze of tears.

  'See what I got, 'Lizbeth-Anne?' Jenny held up a can. '' More kerosene!''

  'Help me, Jenny!' Elizabeth-Anne pleaded, one hand clutching her belly, the other one reaching out in despair. 'Oh, God, Jenny, please help me get out of here!'

  Jenny laughed
scornfully. 'Oh, no, you're going to burn! You and that precious baby you're carrying! See you later, 'Lizbeth-Anne.' She gave a little wave of her fingertips. 'I've got to finish what I've started. I've got to go douse the bedroom of that sweet little litter of yours. Three of them, aren't there? All peacefully asleep, I noticed.'

  Despite the roasting heat, Elizabeth-Anne felt an icy, sickening panic shuddering through her bones. Jenny was not only going to kill her—she was after the girls too! Somehow she had to protect them from this maddened, murderous creature.

  The rushing of her blood and the pounding of her heart screamed through her body. Forgotten for the moment were the floor of fire and the flames roaring angrily up the walls. She knew what she had to do. The mother instinct in her was aroused, and more than blood now pumped through her veins. The adrenaline rushed potently through her too.

  With a cry of rage Elizabeth-Anne flung herself off the bed just as it went up in flames. She hurled herself toward the open door, snatching up the first weapon which caught her eye—Auntie's silver hairbrush lying on the dressing table. She was not even aware of how much heat the handle had absorbed. She only knew that somehow—by whatever means were at her disposal—she had to stop Jenny, and quickly. She had to protect her children. Nothing else mattered.

  Jenny's mouth hung wide with surprise as Elizabeth-Anne leapt through the flames, the brush held high. Then it came arcing down with all the force and lightning speed Elizabeth-Anne could muster. Jenny saw it coming, but too late. She let out a shriek as the brush slammed down on her skull. Then her eyes rolled upward in their sockets and she crumpled to the floor, her hands letting go of the big square tin of kerosene. It thumped down to the floor beside her.

  Elizabeth-Anne raced down the hall to the children's room. 'Regina! 'Becca! Charlotte-Anne!'' she screamed at the top of her lungs. And she told herself to hurry.